It took only a few moments to reach the building we were to set afire. Councilor Partridge smashed the glass door in the front of a shop that occupied the ground floor. He did it with the butt of his rifle and a flash followed. It had been discharged! I rushed past him into the doorway of the shop, calling to the others to come on. Behind me came the sound of a volley, and I fell. It was as I had on the instant divined. That flash had revealed us to the enemy.

"It's all over," I muttered, as I felt myself falling. But a moment later, when I knew I was not dead, I was sure I should pull through. Before another volley could be fired, Mr. Partridge lifted and carried me into the street. There on the sidewalk lay a dark figure in a pool of blood. It was Fred Ryan, a mere lad of seventeen, who had wanted to come with us as one of the party of four.

"We must take him along," I said.

But it was no use; he was dead.

With help, I managed to walk to the corner. Then the other man who had stopped behind to set the building afire caught up with us. Between them they succeeded in carrying me back to the College of Surgeons.

As we came into the vestibule, Jo Connolly was waiting with his bicycle, ready to go out with me to bomb the hotel. His surprise at seeing me hurt was as if I had been out for a stroll upon peaceful streets and met with an accident.

They laid me on a large table and cut away the coat of my fine, new uniform. I cried over that. Then they found I had been shot in three places, my right side under the arm, my right arm, and in the back on my right side. Had I not turned as I went through that shop-door to call to the others, I would have got all three bullets in my back and lungs and surely been done for.

They had to probe several times to get the bullets, and all the while Madam held my hand. But the probing did not hurt as much as she expected it would. My disappointment at not being able to bomb the Hotel Shelbourne was what made me unhappy. They wanted to send me to the hospital across the Green, but I absolutely refused to go. So the men brought in a cot, and the first-aid girls bandaged me, as there was no getting a doctor that night. What really did distress me was my cough and the pain in my chest. When I tried to keep from coughing, I made a queer noise in my throat and noticed every one around me look frightened.

"It's no death-rattle," I explained, and they all had to laugh,—that is, all laughed except Commandant Mallin. He said he could not forgive himself as long as he lived for having let me go out on that errand. But he did not live long, poor fellow! I tried to cheer him by pointing out that he had in reality saved my life, since the bombing plan was much more dangerous.

Soon after I was brought in, the countess and Councilor Partridge disappeared. When she returned to me, she said very quietly:

"You are avenged, my dear."

It seems they had gone out to where Fred Ryan lay, and Partridge, to attract the fire of the soldiers across the street in the Sinn Fein Bank, had stooped over the dead boy to lift him. There were only two soldiers and they both fired. That gave Madam a chance to sight them. She fired twice and killed both.

They tell me that all next day I was delirious and lay moaning and talking incoherently. It was not the bullets that brought me to this pass, but pneumonia. Even so I am glad I was there and not at a hospital. Later a doctor who was summoned made the mistake of using too much corrosive sublimate on my wounds, and for once I knew what torture is. The mistake took all the skin off my side and back. But Madam is a natural nurse. Among her friends she was noted for her desire to care for them if they fell ill. Some one was almost always in bed at Surrey House; some friend whose eyes might be troubling her to whom the countess would read aloud or apply soothing applications; a Fianna boy, or an actress from the Abbey Theater who needed to build up her nerves. Thus I was in good hands, and besides, following my instinct, I ate nothing for the next three days, but drank quantities of water.

PEARSE'S LAST PROCLAMATION

Written under shell and shrapnel fire. (His marvelous
handwriting is due to his mastery of the Gaelic script.)

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Once a day they allowed me visitors. Every one who came to my room was confident that things were going well. That we were isolated from other "forts" and even from headquarters did not necessarily mean they were losing ground. We were holding out, and our spirits rose high. We believed, too, that by this time the Volunteers outside Dublin had risen. We could not know that, even where they had joined the rising on Easter Monday, the loss of one day had given the British enough time to be on guard, so that in no instance could our men enter the barracks and seize arms as originally planned.

While I lay there, I could hear the booming of big guns. All of us believed it was the Germans attacking the British on the water. There had been a rumor that German submarines would come into the fight if they learned there was a chance of our winning it. I had heard that report the evening before the rising. Edmond Kent, one of the republican leaders, had been most confident of our success, and when a friend asked him, "What if the British bring up their big guns?" he replied:

"The moment they bring up their big guns, we win."

He did not explain what he meant by this, but I took it that he expected outside aid the minute the British, recognizing our revolt as serious, gave us the dignity of combatants by using heavy artillery against us. Whatever he meant, the fact remains that when they took this action, they made us a "belligerent" in the world's eyes and gave us the excuse we could so well use—an appeal to the world court as a "small nation," for a place at the coming peace conference.

Sunday morning one of the despatch-girls, white and scared because she had been escorted to our "fort" by British soldiers, came from headquarters to inform Commandant Mallin that a general surrender had been decided on. The Commandant and Madam were in my room at the time, and Madam instantly grew pale.

"Surrender?" she cried. "We'll never surrender!"

Then she begged the Commandant, who could make the decision for our division, not to think of giving in. It would be better, she said, for all of us to be killed at our posts. I felt as she did about it, but the girl who had brought the despatch became more and more excited, saying that the soldiers outside had threatened to "blow her little head off" if she did not come out soon with the word they wanted. Possibly they suspected any Irish girl would be more likely to urge resistance than surrender.

Commandant Mallin, to quiet us, I suppose, said he would not surrender unless forced to do so. But he must have decided to give in at once, for in less than an hour an ambulance came to take me to St. Vincent's Hospital, just across the Green.

As they carried me down-stairs, our boys came out to shake my hand. I urged them again and again to hold out. As I said good-by to Commandant Mallin, I had a feeling I should never see him again. Not that it entered my head for a moment that he would be executed by the British. Despite all our wrongs and their injustices, I did not dream of their killing prisoners of war.

I felt no such dread concerning the countess, though our last words together were about her will. I had witnessed it, and she had slipped it in the lining of my coat. I was to get it to her family at the earliest possible moment. It was fortunate that I did.

My departure was the first move in the surrender. That afternoon all the revolutionists gave up their arms to the British in St. Patrick's Square.

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